House in Psychico

Pantelis Nicolacopoulos has broken away from the local Greek idiom, treating it more as a 'modern tradition' that can be re-interpreted, focusing on clarity of detail and construction quality. For this house in Psychico, a leafy suburb of Athens, he proposed a 21st-century 'refined' version of a 'béton brut' Corbusian house. Because of the proximity to neighbouring buildings, the two long sides are more or less closed, while the front and rear open up respectively to the street and a small front garden and to a large rear garden with linear swimming pool. In plan, the building is organized in three linear strips that accommodate spaces of equal width but varied length. Since the house's corridors are spacious and give direct access to all the rooms, they are not mere circulation spaces but can be seen as a kind of 'domestic public space'. Indeed, the architect has suggested that the same layout could be used for a public building.